Universal Design for Learning: Guided Access

Guided Access is a great feature on the iPad for when students are using apps in the classroom.  Why I like Guided Access is that you can lock students into an app that does not allow them access to any other app. I also like that you can block out areas that you don't want them to use, for example: in-App purchases, connecting to the internet, or settings may be features in an app that I would not want my students to click on.  In the art room, I often will have students using more than one app to create their digital art. If I was using Guided Access, this would not be possible without typing in the password every time.  You could also run into the problem of students understanding how Guided Access works and that they may set it up and lock the iPad into an app and the teacher wouldn't know the password, which made it so you couldn't turn Guided Access off. I'm sure there is some way around that, but my son came home yesterday and said that this happened in his 4th grade classroom and that his teacher was pretty upset about it and no one would admit to it so that they could find out the password. I would be most likely to use the Guided Access with kindergarten and first grade, I think.  But using Guided Access would limit us to just creating things and not having evidence of them.  A lot of the apps we use, I end up taking screenshots of what they make...and I noticed that in Guided Access you are not able to use that feature.

Universal Design for Learning: Text-to-Speech/Speak Selection

Here I've enabled Speak Selection in my settings. I was then able to find an article, highlight selected text and it spoke the text.  This is super easy to do, though I had to make some adjustments with the speaking rate

I went to a website and found the article above.  I just highlighted the text and it spoke the article.  I think that this would be very helpful for reading. In the classroom, students can hear text as it's being read. I also like the feature of how the word that is being read is highlighted. I think this could help with reading fluency as well as comprehension. If I created ebooks for my students that relate specifically to lessons and skills they will have to learn, they are not limited by their reading levels.  They can simply sit down with a pair of headphones and with Speak Selection, they are able to listen to the directions or the lesson again.  I also think that it would be great for research on a particular topic.  Students could find an article on line and then use Speak Selection to have it read to them.

Universal Design for Learning: Speech to Text

The iPad’s built in accessibility features are free, and designed to support all users.  They are universal in scope, meaning that we all use them at one time or another. The iPad’s accessibility features allow each user to customize the device to meet their needs and preferences. Among other things, users can customize settings to view websites clutter-free, enlarge font, zoom in to see close up, have text read aloud, speak to write, adjust the background color, use abbreviation expansion and limit a user's access to specific apps/pages. 

The iPad has some universal features built in that can assist with learning.  The first one I am going to be presenting here is Speech-to-Text, and specifically Dragon Dictation. To use this app, I had to first download it to my iPad.  I found Dragon Dictation easy to use. What I don't like, is that some of the words get mixed up or misinterpreted and sometimes It takes more time to go back in and add punctuation and Capital letters and change the words.  I find that this app that is supposed to save me time, doesn't really do the job.  I made this screencast about the app and how I tried to use it.  I was thinking it might be great for a lot of typing up of artist statements that I need to do for the art show.  Unfortunately, it turns out that it's actually faster for me to type them out on the keyboard on my computer than to try the speech-to-text.